As a web developer we spend a lot of time installing updates. With applications we use testing frameworks to ensure the system behaves properly after an update. But these testing frameworks don’t exist for simple websites running content management frameworks like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. We’re expected to check each page before and after an update and notice any difference… well that’s just not a great use of time.
Today I put together a simple way to test a whole bunch of pages on a site and report back if any of them are different from the last time they were checked. In a matter of minutes we know if an update has caused mass errors and with a bit of scanning we can tell if there are minor differences that weren’t expected.
For the technically minded, we use wget on a file of urls like this:
wget -i ./url_file
and store the results in two directories. Then we use a diff program like OpenDiff to visually compare the two directories like this:
opendiff ./site_v1 ./site_v2
A real site saver…